The ugly truth

I am committed to telling things as they are. You already know that about me, having read this blog.

Now, you’ll find few people mention this. But I think it’s a rather sore point and it should be dealt with. Fact: some people will set you back.

Oh, I’ve been there. And it is so frustrating – especially to me, since I’m proactive by nature and tend to plan ahead and consider milestones and possible situations that may set me back and how to address them so that my deadline is kept.

It’s true some people do not get the importance of deadline. You could explain and explain and they still could not get it. Some lack empathy and thus no matter how well you state your reasons, you won’t get that reaction from them – to send the information you need before the deadline is done.

Others simply believe there’s no importance to observing a deadline. So what if you’re past it?! At least you have delivered something.

Well, I can tell from my experience, dealing with this kind of people will demotivate you, stress you out and make you lose confidence in you and the success of your project. The ideal situation would be to not work with them.

But when you have no choice, you have to find solutions in order to make it work.

Here’s how I made it work.

I had this collaborator and it was absolutely a nightmare to work with. She would call me daily and have her monologues and excuses thrown at me, to no end result.

I am a really pragmatic person and I do not like to sit around and chat just for the sake of it. Conclusions must be drawn and actions planned, and never-ending meetings and calls without these are absolutely futile. 

Anyway, after a certain point I realized that she would never change and I was the one in charge if I wanted things to turn out differently with the project. One day she had called me 3 times and when I calculated the time that I spent listening (because I almost never got the chance to speak), I saw that I wasted three hours from my working day listening to a senseless monologue.

So I started dodging her calls and insisting on the fact that she should only call me if there was something urgent.

It was hard at first, but she finally got it. But that was not enough, of course, to finish the project in time. Thus, I talked with the other collaborators to the project and agreed upon the following action: since she was the only one not complying with the deadline, while the rest of us did, there was only one solution – to set a different deadline for her. And we did. Her deadline would be a week before ours. And it worked. And even though she usually sent the information after the expiration of her deadline, we would always manage to finish our project in time.

Well, some may judge the fairness of this trick. But it’s just it, a trick to help deliver a project. The thing is to always make sure your collaborators know about the special deadline so that they won’t give you away and compromise the delivery of the project.